Maledicte marks Lane Robins’ first effort as a novelist, and a glance at the cover - which depicts and androgynous face in profile, eyes covered with an ornate Venetian-style domino, the title written with gothic type and the tagline: “A novel of love, betrayal, and vengeance” – it quickly becomes clear that Robins is aiming at a brand of dark fantasy of manners and courtly intrigue that have been very successful in the hands of writers like Jacqueline Carey and Ellen Kushner.

The story starts with a short prologue, where the reader is introduced to two teenagers, Miranda and Janus, who eke out a precarious existence in the Relicts, the slum of Murne, capital of the kingdom of Antyre. Here, Janus is kidnapped by a nobleman acting on the behalf of the Earl of Last. Janus is, in fact, the illegitimate son of the earl, who is in desperate need of an heir. The children know none of this, and the kidnapping thus takes a violent turn. In her desperation, Miranda takes an oath of vengeance and gives her soul into the keeping of Black-Winged Ani, the merciless and bloodthirsty goddess of love and revenge. She intends to reclaim Janus, her first love, and kill his father, the earl of Last.

Disguised as a young man, Miranda enters the household of the baron Vornatti where she creates the persona of Maledicte. Three years later, Maledicte is introduced at the court of King Aris under the patronage of Vornatti. Here s/he cuts an enigmatic and elegant figure, wielding an equally sharp-edge wit and sword among a dissolute nobility. Maledicte attracts the attention of the king with his androgynous beauty, but s/he also creates scandal and makes enemies.

It is at court that Maledicte meets Janus again. They enter into a scandalous love affair that quickly becomes tainted by the ambitions of Janus. As the son of an earl and the nephew of the king, Janus is highly placed at court. He is, however, not content and thus schemes ruthlessly in order to crawl closer to the throne of Antyre. He doesn’t hesitate to use Maledicte, whose god-ridden bloodlust steadily increases, to eliminate whoever stands in his way. However, events spin out of control as Maledicte, goaded by Ani’s lust for blood, edges ever closer to madness. Maledicte is torn between several different identities and the question is whether s/he can recover herself in order to prevent destroying all s/he holds dear.

Lane Robins is very deft in the pacing of the plot, doling out information sparingly in order to create suspense. This makes for at somewhat slow start, but the reader’s patience is rewarded when the story increases in intensity after the first hundred or so pages. The story is focused on courtly intrigues and is full of twists and turns, some fairly unexpected and surprising. The prose is fluid, yet unobtrusive with some shining moments in the descriptions of the opulence of the aristocratic environment and the deadly, sharp-witted banter of the jaded courtiers.

The world-building is sketchy, to say the least. Details about the world the characters inhabit are used very sparingly and only when it suits the plot. The result is a rather hazy impression of a Regency-style world of high society balancing on the cusp of a “modern” era (with oblique references to colonial expansion and industrial innovation). The city Murne, where most of the story takes place, is a little better fleshed out, and Robins makes a few attempts at providing her world with some back-story. However, details about Antyre’s history, its relations with the neighbouring Itarus, its religion and the exile of the gods is scattered about the text in an haphazard and inconsistent manner, which in the end imparts no more than a fuzzy outline of the fantastical world Maledicte inhabits. Actually, it is Maledicte himself, who, unwittingly voices the reader’s experience of the world the story is set in:

Quote:
"Maledicte thought of maps and distance, but his knowledge was sketchy. Vornatti had taught him about the city and its fashionable retreats. Janus had told him about Itarus, and Gilly had sweetened his dreams with descriptions of the Explorations. Ennisere meant nothing, a foggy blur on an unfinished map of the world."

The world of Robins’ novel can in fact best be described as an unfinished map, its fuzzy and blank spots enticing and intriguing, its inconsistencies unexplained. Why, for example, are the god-ridden traditionally persecuted as witches despite their roles as vessels of the divine? How were the exiled gods worshipped? How much did they interfere in the lives of mortals and was their interference always detrimental to humans? One of the themes in Maledicte is the question of superstition since most people, except Vornatti’s man-servant Gilly, believe that the old gods are simply a fabrication, which is why very few are able to recognize that Maledicte functions a vessel for Ani’s bloodlust. But this theme is ultimately undermined by the lack of information. The reader is simply told that the gods disappeared after a battle a few decades back and that people happily abandoned religion altogether – a rather implausible explanation in my opinion. All in all, Lane Robins’ gives the reader a tantalising glimpse of a rather fascinating world and one can only hope that she will develop it further in subsequent books.

Apart from the world-building, my main criticism of the novel concerns the characterization. The story is told via a third person narrative with shifting POV, which can be slightly confusing at times. The main POV is, however, not that of Miranda/Maledicte but instead of the servant Gilly, who plays the role of Maledicte’s friend and confidant as well as the primary witness to the events of the story. He therefore comes across as not only the most sympathetic of the characters but also as the main character of the story. Maledicte is as much Gilly’s story as it is Mirande/Maledicte’s. The reader is only rarely given an insight into the workings of Maledicte’s mind, a fact that lessens the emotional impact of his/her role as the supposed main character. Maledicte mostly comes across as sinister and childishly sullen rather than charismatic and intriguing. In the end, this rather distanced perspective makes it somewhat difficult for the reader to engage herself in the eventual fate of Maledicte and Janus. I, at least, found that I cared more about what happened to Gilly than to the other characters.

I found the question of Maledicte’s multiple identities one of the most interesting aspects of the novel, and was therefore quite frustrated with the author’s inability to explore, in a satisfying manner, the demands and expectations between the overlapping and conflicting identities of Miranda, Maledicte and Ani. Part of the problem is connected to the use of POV, while another relates to the lack of back-story. Miranda and her relationship with Janus are simply not developed enough, prior to the creation of the Maledicte persona, to be convincing and make her yearning for revenge understandable. Their all-encompassing love remains a postulate that is stated by the characters but never proven by the narrative itself. Maledicte’s complete devotion to Janus is fundamentally incomprehensible to the reader (especially as regards the manner in which Janus later makes use of his lover) because one is never really made to understand exactly what these two young people meant to each before the main plot is set into motion. Since the whole story revolves around a love thwarted and betrayed, the lack of back-story for Miranda and Janus is a rather serious failing on the author’s part. Another poorly developed aspect is the process in which the poor street-rat Miranda transforms herself into the elegant, sharp-witted courtier and swordsman Maledicte, something which could have helped to explain how the young woman comes to identify so completely with an identity gendered in the masculine.

Ani’s divine possession of Miranda/Maledicte is perhaps the single-most fascinating aspect of the story, but it suffers from a somewhat uneven handling that oscillates between psychological exploration and external action. Robins gives the reader a few tantalizing hints of the inner conflict between the vengeful goddess and her human vessel, since Maledicte at times attempts to withstand Ani’s seductive whisperings of blood and death. Robins strives to maintain this delicate balance between Maledicte and Ani through most of the novel, but since the POV mostly belong to Gilly and rarely to Maledicte, this aspect often comes across as a pretext for escalating the violence to a level that sometimes approaches the farcical. I must admit that I was continually amazed at the licence Maledicte was given by the king despite his very suspect actions.

Maledicte by Lane Robins can perhaps best be described as a high-strung melodrama of manners, set in a dark and glittering world of courtly intrigue where love and betrayal walks hand in hand. It is an entertaining and suspenseful read, which might appeal to fans of Jacqueline Carey and Ellen Kushner, though it doesn’t reach the high standards of their work. Despite my reservations, I still consider Maledicte a solid first effort from a promising author. Lane Robins is certainly an author worth watching.

On December 21, the longest night of the year, Sue Young gets a mysterious phone call from an omnipresent man who has kidnapped her 18 month old daughter who was in the care of her nanny. The man on the other end of the line has knowledge about a secret crime that Sue and her estranged, now missing, husband committed when they were teens. The mystery man has a series of instructions for her and an expected time frame for completion. So, in other words jump through hoops to get your daughter back or I'll kill her.

Does this sound like a typical thriller to you?

It did to me, and I almost put the book down early on to be truthful. But, I'm glad that I didn’t. Given how short Chasing the Dead is I was worried that it wouldn’t be able to pull out of its tailspin of conventionality. But the books pace became its biggest ally for correcting its course. It's Sue's first instruction that saves it from the complacency of the first few pages. She is to drive to a nearby town and dig up a decades old corpse, put it in the back of her SUV and follow driving instructions that will be given to her. When she finally gets the body back to her vehicle she finds her nannies dead body in the passenger seat with her eyes gouged out and a map stuck to her chest. It’s this scene, culminating in Sue's shock that gets the book back on course. From the moment that the kidnapping occurred I had one large unrelenting thought that was over riding my brain, the f--k--g nanny did it! Given its almost banal beginning I was sure that this was what was going to happen. So when she was so effectively killed early on I breathed a sigh of relief.

The instructions are a map with a pre-determined route laid out for her and a certain time frame in which to complete this cannon ball run into hell. To make this task harder a bad snow storm is moving in. Ultimately Sue's skills as an ex-ambulance driver will come into play throughout the entire evening, she will prove to be a fiercely determined woman who doesn’t crumble easily under pressure.

What makes this thriller exceptional though is Schreiber's decision to hijack Sue's SUV and drive it right off the thriller map and into supernatural territory. After committing a grave robbery she will come across the ghosts of her past, the ghosts of people murdered, ghosts of murderers. Not to mention the zombies, animate dead and possessed. The chilling history of a Massachusetts man who was a child serial killer during the states, and country’s formative years will be given to us as well. Eventually connections are made and secrets are revealed as Sue begins to question who is really pulling her puppet strings. All of this culminates in a showdown that any fan of Stephen King would be proud of that is chilling, exciting and action packed.


-Brian Lindenmuth

At the hopelessly fatalistic conclusion of Six Bad Things Hank has lost the 4 million dollars, killed his friend who knew the location of the money and has been ensnared in the web of Russian crime boss David Dolokov, the owner of the money. Dolokov being the business minded individual that he is doesn’t take the loss of the money personally; instead he views it simply as a debt that Hank needs to pay off. Dolokov arranges for a cut rate plastic surgeon to alter Hank’s face so that he can become an invisible weapon. Dolokov's own private ghost, to do his bidding and his killing. Dolokov holds the threat of killing Hank's parents over his head to keep him in line.

With Dolokov's view of Hank as an investment he brings in a professional Serbian killer, Branko, to guide Hank in the ways of a clean kill. Hank balks at these early lessons but soon picks it up. Hank becomes increasingly disturbed by his lot in life and his grip on life starts to slip as he becomes addicted to pills, drugs and alcohol. He becomes increasingly haunted in his dreams by those that he has killed. With his grasp on the job slipping Hank is starting to become aware that Dolokov and Branko are becoming frustrated with his performance. Hank needs to shape up or die.

One of the qualities that make Hank a compelling, likable and unique character in noir is that he is not a "bad" guy. Noir has a tendency to deal in absolutes, though the great modern noir stories are resolutely grey, and Hank is grey. He is just a guy who has made some wrong choices over the years and is now caught up in events that he has no control over. He is at heart a good guy. Hank is acutely aware of the bad things that he has done and the sins that he has committed. He is ever searching for redemption. In one final act of contrition he doesn't secure his own salvation but more tellingly tries to secure the safety of those that are closest to him, those that he has hurt and those that he has come to care for.

Two characters become the catalyst for the books action. Miguel and Ana. Miguel is young baseball player whose star is on the rise. He has been drafted by the Mets and will put in some time in their farm system before moving to the Bigs. Miguel has a bad gambling problem and Dolokov has bought all of the outstanding debts and now holds the paper. Knowing that the kid is going to go far in Major League Baseball, Miguel is still allowed to bet heavily, banking against his future earnings. Hank becomes Miguel’s bodyguard thus ultimately providing the impetus for Hanks fateful return to New York, where this whole saga originally started. Ana is Dolokov's sister in law and it was her nephew Mikhail that Hank killed in Six Bad Things. Ever since her son's death she has been after Dolokov to find and kill Hank, Dolokov swears to her that he is dead and Ana doesn’t believe him. Through a chance meeting she discovers the identity of Dolokov's "ghost" and sends her military trained nephews after Hank. Ana informs Hank that he is going to kill Dolokov for her. Meanwhile Dolokov has instructed Hank to kill Ana and that this will be last job.

My biggest complaint that I find in Houston's work is more general in nature then specific, and is probably my fault more then his, but it bears mentioning. I sometimes find that there were missed opportunities. There is a foot chase sequence in A Dangerous man that in summary goes down the boardwalk, through a flea market and winds up in a huge parking lot packed tight with empty school buses. This scene ended far too quickly and could have been fleshed out more; it seemed like a missed opportunity. There was a lot of potential material in that scene that Huston skirted the edges of but ultimately was left untouched.

A Dangerous Man was the first book that Huston wrote as a full time writer and it shows. Houston seems to hold a self deprecating opinion of his skills as a writer. But I don’t buy into his bullshit. He is in fact a skilled writer and a natural storyteller; these traits have been evident from the beginning and extend into all of his outlets.

I want to take a closer look at one scene that I think shows why Huston is one of the best and quickly becoming a modern master.

The linear summary of the scene starts with the very first meeting of Hank and Miguel. After many hours of gambling and partying in Vegas there is an altercation in a strip club where Miguel comes to the aid of a dancer causing another party of three men to be ejected from the club. This other group meets them in the parking lot where they start a fight with Hank, Miguel and his friend. Hank, as he is want to do when confronted with unexpected violence, spins into action and violently ends the situation leaving one of the men bleeding from his rectum. They then have some down time and Hank sees the other two to their plane. Over the course of the evening the three men start to connect and bond a little with Hank having to admit to himself that he likes Miguel, who seems like a genuinely good guy but is in over his head.

On its own it is a quality section of the book that highlights: the friendship between Miguel and his friend; the hanger-on quality of his friend, and others; a snapshot of Sin City; the general likeability of Miguel, to name but a few moments. All of these climax in a bar fight with a brief respite before he leaves. In and of itself it is complete; it could almost stand on its own as a piece of short fiction. But it’s not a stand alone story, its one part of a larger narrative. So we are well aware of the weight that hangs heavy on Hanks heart as he sees some of his younger self in Miguel and how far down the toilet his life has come. Miguel, whether he realizes it or not, is standing at the crossroads of his life. He is on the cusp of achieving great success that is also intertwined with great failure. He has the potential to lose control of his blessed life or pull himself out of his downward spiral and ultimately through Hank's actions that choice will be his to make. In fact we meet him at the beginning of his realization that things are about to go bad.

But Huston being the irreverent stylist that he is decided to present it in a different light. He starts off the sequence in medias res, at the beginning of the parking lot fight, before we know any of the five other participants. The immediate effect is that of confusion, but this quickly turns into tension and suspense. Our mind is filled with questions that Huston isn’t providing the answers for. When these emotions quickly arrive at their peak he changes gears and takes us back to the beginning of the evening, when Hank and the two men meet for the first time. Over the course of the lengthy descriptions of their drunken, bacchanalian revels, which includes losing $100,000 gambling, we are treated to intermittent continuations of the fight that takes increasingly greater importance as we become better acquainted with the primary characters.

When we finally arrive at the moment that starts the fight the already frenetic pace becomes impossibly faster as all of the information about the immediate events snaps into place like a taut rubber band being let go. As the tensions escalate we prepare ourselves for the fight that we know is about to happen, but it never does, because it already did. Our emotions have been masterfully manipulated to heighten the scene to its utmost capacity but since the release of the contained energy was already given to us in the beginning, before we knew that we needed the release, Huston leaves us to carry that tension in our gut, where it stays throughout the duration of the novel.

Houston plays it fast and loose in all of his stories, that's his style and quickly becoming his trademark. It's a credit to his skill as a writer that he hits the mark most of the time. Even if he does miss the mark occasionally he is never dull or boring. If I were forced to point out a crutch of his it would be that he sometimes has a tendency to have one character (not the protagonist) provide a lengthy discourse that explains everything to the protagonist. One imagines a “bad guy” monologuing or even Columbo in his trench coat walking around the table explaining it all. His occasional reliance on this tactic may be his most obvious shortcoming but it’s a forgivable one.


-Brian Lindenmuth

In Barbara Hambly’s The Ladies of Mandrigyn, Captain Sun Wolf is hired by the women of the City of Mandrigyn to help put an end to the evil festering in the nearby mines and to kill the immortal wizard Altiokis. Sun Wolf is the renowned leader of a mercenary army, but refuses to take on the challenge. Unfortunately for him—and his partner, Starhawk—the ladies of Mandrigyn will not accept “no” for an answer. The leader of the ladies, Sheera Galernas, poisons Sun Wolf and offers him this dilemma: train them as soldiers or die slowly. Starhawk, left behind without any answers, must now set out to rescue him, gaining several interesting traveling companions along the way, ones she’s not sure she can totally trust.

Released at the height of sword and sorcery’s popularity in the 1980s, The Ladies of Mandrigyn has everything one might expect to find in such an adventure: moody protagonist, shadowy evil, large-scale battles with the undead, iniquitous sorcery, years of forgotten history, and so forth. The one refreshing bit of The Ladies of Mandrigyn is the independence of its female characters, how strong they are, and how willingly they will fight to save their husbands condemned to eternal labor in the mines below the city. Hambly’s characters stray away from being just one-dimensional cutouts, and from what it seemed, not many of them are very attractive, both physically and internally.

The Ladies of Mandrigyn is divided between Sun Wolf chapters and Starhawk chapters; in the beginning, Sun Wolf’s were the more engaging, as his being poisoned clearly causes tension from the moment he awakes tied in chains, but towards the middle and end of the book, Starhawk begun to shine as her own character. Her unspoken love for her captain drives each footstep, escalating to a marvelous resolution when she finally reaches him. Hambly’s world is of epic fantasy standards, with city-like locales rampant with towers and dungeons, but her biggest contribution is the touch of authentication during the sword training sessions taught by Sun Wolf. They are realistic and engaging.

The Ladies of Mandrigyn is a strong start in the Sun Wolf and Starhawk series (the remaining books being The Witches of Wenshar and The Dark Hand of Magic) with a fast-paced plot and characters with more depth than the average S&S hero/heroine. The adventure is fun, complete with an actual ending that does its job of closing up all its threads.

This is a great little book by the author of the alternate-history classic Bring The Jubilee. It has an original premise for an end-of-the-world novel too, with the calamity being caused by an unstoppable growth of Bermuda grass ...

It’s told from the perspective of one Albert Weener - the author shows his cards at the start of the book when he declares that we are all Albert Weener. I gather the message of this is that we all profit from the misfortune of others ... more on that later.

Weener begins the book as a cocky door-to-door-salesman. He's retained to promote a chemical that allows plants of the grass family to grow anywhere.

He’s quite a sharp fellow with an eye for the money-making potential of a product that improves grass growth. Forget wheat and corn to feed the starving millions: why not sell it to the proud gardeners of California?

Unfortunately, the product hasn’t been fully tested yet (there's a warning for proponents of GM plants!) and while it succeeds in accelerating the growth of common lawn grass, there seems to be no mechanism to switch the grass off again.

Soon the grass of the lawn he test-sprayed grows to engulf the house, thwarting mowers, scythes and progressively more and more extreme solutions. Then the grass spreads through the neighbourhood, across the city, through California ...

The book is quite funny, as is the idea of our being threatened by something we find underfoot every day. Nevertheless there is something sinister about long grass: see Signs, Children of the Corn, or read Sheri Tepper's novel Grass for examples. It's probably its uniformity, concealing nature, and the rustling of course.

Ward plays out his story well. The book is by turns satirical and whimsical, eerie and cynical as the disaster unfolds. The book telescopically covers events over the course of twenty years, as first America, then the world are threatened by the spread of the grassy menace.

Albert Weener finds himself well suited to profit from the disaster when he comes into possession somehow of a company called Consolidated Pemmican. Thus when millions are being displaced and killed by the grass, he's able to change his base of operations to other countries and continents, all the while making money from lucrative War-On-Grass related contracts.

I quite enjoyed the book, but found it worked better as a satire of end-of-the-world novels rather than of society as a whole, although it does contain some relevance to the genetically-modified foods debate, if you want to look into it deeply.

Otherwise just enjoy it: it's different and stylish in a 1940s way. The language some of the characters use is great, and there's some very memorable moments. Particularly the ending.